What is SemrushBot-SA?
SemrushBot-SA crawls websites to perform comprehensive SEO analysis and identify technical issues for site audit and optimization recommendations. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Semrush |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 15, 2026 |
Category
Expected Behavior
SemrushBot-SA maps sites the way its customers' SEO tools need, following internal links to build a full picture of structure, content, and ranking signals. Expect thorough crawls rather than spot checks, with frequency rising when your site or your competitors are actively monitored in its tools.
SemrushBot-SA's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; SemrushBot-SA/0.97; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html) |
How To Block SemrushBot-SA With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block SemrushBot-SA from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all SEO crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: SemrushBot-SA # https://knownagents.com/agents/semrushbot-sa
Disallow: /Global Insights for SemrushBot-SA
As of July 15, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
1% of top websites block SemrushBot-SA in their robots.txt files.
Overall SEO Crawler Traffic
2.5% of all web traffic came from SEO crawlers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block SemrushBot-SA?
Only if you want your own pages and outbound links out of those tools. SemrushBot-SA collects the ranking and backlink data behind SEO tools, likely including ones you or your agency use, and it does not change how search engines rank you. Blocking it will not hide your backlink profile either, because backlinks are discovered on the sites that link to you. For comparison, 1% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for SemrushBot-SA.
Does SemrushBot-SA Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. SemrushBot-SA is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms SemrushBot-SA actually follows it.
Does SemrushBot-SA Access Private Content?
Login walls stop it. SemrushBot-SA analyzes public pages for rankings, links, and site structure.
Why Is SemrushBot-SA Visiting My Website?
Your domain shows up in the ranking, backlink, and competitor data SemrushBot-SA's operator sells. If anyone tracks your site or your competitors in an SEO tool, SemrushBot-SA visits you.
How Can I Tell if SemrushBot-SA Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks SemrushBot-SA visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "SemrushBot-SA". Look for full site crawls that follow your internal links. Keep in mind that SemrushBot-SA doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.